A staggering five of the top 10 ads were centered around this year’s World Cup, dwarfing the Super Bowl, which only placed one ad on the list.

Topping the chart was the music video for Shakira’s World Cup anthem “La La La,” which was sponsored by the yogurt brand Activia in coordination with the UN’s anti-hunger group, the World Food Programme.

Both Google and Facebook are taking ad fraud more seriously as the problems it creates continue to permeate online advertising. In a move to eliminate ad fraud and botnets, Google bought the small London anti-malware startup Spider.io, which is credited with busting Chameleon, a botnet that cost the industry a reported $6 million each month by generating fake impressions. Google will start by implementing Spider.io’s tools into video and display ads to gauge more accurate metrics. “Over the long term, our goal is to improve the metrics that advertisers and publishers use to determine the value of digital media and give all parties a clearer, cleaner picture of what campaigns and media are truly delivering strong results,” Google VP Digital Advertising Neal Mohan told Wired. “Also, by including Spider.io’s fraud fighting expertise in our products, we can scale our efforts to weed out bad actors and improve the entire digital ecosystem.” Between the Spider.io team’s findings and continued efforts by the IAB’s Traffic of Good Intent Task Force, Mohan said he hopes to get ahead of the issue.

Meanwhile, Facebook is under scrutiny, thanks to a recent viral video by science blogger Derek Muller called “Facebook Fraud,” which highlights the problem of fake (paid) likes and questions the value of Facebook advertising. Are “click farms” invading Facebook’s ad system, and do they benefit the social giant? Facebook leaders are on the defensive. “Fake likes don’t help us,” a Facebook spokesperson told Mashable. “For the last two years, we have focused on proving that our ads drive business results, and we have even updated our ads to focus more on driving business objectives,” a Facebook spokesperson told Mashable. Because fake likes are rampant, many marketers have given up on collecting likes and focused on engagement on Facebook. “We gave up on [likes] ages ago,” marketing exec Jeff Selig told Mashable. “If you take likes out of the equation and you are actually selling something, I think you’re better off. I think the days of the popularity contest are over.” Now that publishers and tech companies are more focused on fighting fraud, it’s time for advertisers to get in the fray as well. “In the end, if the problem is to be solved, one key party must get deeply involved: clients,” wrote Digiday’s Jack Marshall. “It’s their ad dollars being wasted, after all, so it’s up to them to ask the right questions of their partners.”

“On July 15, 2014, Distil Networks attended the Senate hearing “Taking Down Botnets: Public and Private Efforts to Disrupt and Dismantle Cybercriminal Networks” in Washington, D.C., headed bySenator Whitehouse (D-RI) and ranking member Senator Graham (R-SC). This hearing was hosted to provide testimony to the Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, which has recently been ramping up efforts to draw attention to both the economic and security threats that bots andbotnets pose to the United States and the global community. Testimony was offered by Leslie Caldwell, Assistant Attorney General for the DOJ’s Criminal Division; Joseph Demarest, Jr., Assistant Director to the Cyber Division of the FBI, and several private sector representatives, including Richard Boscovich, Assistant General Counsel for the Digital Crimes Unit of Microsoft; Cheri McGuire, VP of Global Government Affairs & Cybersecurity Policy at Symantec; Craig Spiezle, Executive Director of the Online Trust Alliance; and Dr. Paul Vixie, CEO of Farsight Security.”

The Evian baby viral ad (red spike) got almost as much search volume as eTrade’s Superbowl ad of 2009 (blue spike). But Evian paid millions less by skipping the expense of airing the video on traditional media; instead they just posted it to YouTube for free. But notice that in both cases the effect was ephemeral (not long lasting) — notice the narrowness of the spike. Interest in the viral video also subsided quickly. But at least Evian didn’t waste millions on producing and airing it — thus achieving a massively larger ROI than Etrade who paid to make the ads and then air it at great expense on the Superbowl for the last 3 years.

Take a home video like this one (posted January 24, 2007) – 1.1 million views

make it more extreme like this (posted August 03, 2009) – 2.7 million views

Promote the heck out of it through paid media and traditional PR support (i.e. seed it to every gullible news outlet) and let them put it on the news (for free). And be sure to cover your tracks by turning off “statistics and data” on the YouTube video so people can’t back track where you promoted the video.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, no one will ever know if this viral video drove any sales like the JKWeddingDance one did for Chris Brown’s single “Forever” which hit the top of the sales charts on iTunes and Amazon MP3 the same week.

Digital Consigliere

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.